Zach Burks on Mintable's NFT marketplace built on Zilliqa

0:20your team are working on with mintable and how you're utilizing the blockchain to disrupt commerce yeah so mintable is a online platform for content creators to take the work that they're creating and tokenize it and we use these tokens called nfts which are non-fundable tokens and what that means is that you can take something like artwork or you can take

0:43something like music or maybe a deed to a house and you can put that as a item that is digitally tangible on the blockchain and so you'll be able to own this item in your wallet a lot of people are really already familiar with this with like crypto kitties or gods unchained trading cards it's essentially a mechanism for you to be able to kind of create a singular item and

1:10represent that on the blockchain so for a content creator it allows kind of new mechanisms for continuous engagement so if you create artwork you can make 10 prints which are like 10 tokens and you can say i'm only going to make 10 of these and these are the only 10 that will ever exist and you can verify with 100 authenticity that i am the owner and i

1:33own this assets in my wallet and so that allows for like a collectible aspect to be attached to you know like a jpeg which you really can't do if you don't utilize the blockchain so it's a it's an interesting platform that allows for kind of a new dynamic for content creators to engage their fans or their supporters yeah it's definitely interesting and it

1:56is more of a new dynamic and what we've seen with the crypto kitties and gods unchained as you mentioned we have these digital cards but as we move into tokenizing more things it seems like you know any real world item you can sort of tokenize and create a unique version of it on the blockchain but it really hasn't come to fruition in terms of a lot of things in the real world

2:18getting tokenized yet it's sort of early stage but it shows a lot of promise you know when did you first get interested in nfts and you know how early on in the nft stage did you start thinking of conceptualizing mintable so i was actually really lucky and i found nfts pretty much as soon as they were like introduced into the ecosystem right i like to say i

2:41was the first person to ever make money on cryptokitties which is a weird flex but it was because before it went live at the hackathon they were presenting that i was able to play around with it and i won the first prize that they were giving out so when crypto kitties came out they kind of started the nft like craze there was an example

3:00before them called crypto punks a few months before but that didn't really associate these kind of non-fungible tokens to a standard so when i found that was about late 2017 and then from that point forward i just never looked back i was like wow you know the potential here of what it could you know apply to is massive so after i found that i started

3:22working on a project in california for food traceability to track food along its supply chain using these non-fungible tokens from you know the farm to the consumer i had a paper published on that with the ieee and then later i was working on a project that i needed kind of something to do and so i just because i like nfts i made this nft

3:45creator and manager and that kind of evolved into mintable over time intel became the first kind of minting platform so there was no other place for you to mint a token and then we were also the first to be a manager for those tokens because they weren't widely supported at the time so it was hard for you to like transfer them or to mint more tokens

4:06and then you know as time went on we just kept involving and evolving releasing different features to kind of push the space forward very cool and now with mintable you're able to tokenize and as you mentioned like artists can tokenize their content or you can tokenize you know any real world asset if there's an artist that's interested in potentially tokenizing their artwork

4:28and being able to monetize that online do they need to have any technical knowledge or how easy is it for them to go and get that done yeah so it's actually super easy it's you're it's it's essentially you just fill out some information you say like what's the name you know what's the description if i'm gonna sell it what price am i

4:49gonna sell that and then we allow you to upload any file so you know you can upload from a jpeg to an mp3 to a zip file with you know hundreds of different files in there so you can essentially tokenize anything that's digital now doing real world items is like the first thing that your mind goes to like i'm gonna tokenize my car and i'm gonna sell my car but that's

5:10very difficult to do in practicality because you need to be able to have a way for you to connect the two assets so if i bought on an exchange you know like a marketplace like mintable if i bought that car token how are you going to send me the real card right and so that's that's the problem with the real world assets so right now about 99

5:32of everything is digital assets you know the files the artwork music or maybe access to like a form but there are some projects that have solved that problem for doing real world assets and like one example is like collectible bottle fence so when you buy the nft you can redeem that nft on their website and then they mail you the bobblehead and then that

5:54bobblehead where they know you actually has a wallet attached to it that owns the nft of itself so that you have both those items so that's one way that people kind of get around the problems and overall though you know our work is super simple the whole thing we take pride in is the fact that you don't have to know how to code you get a smart contract

6:15that you control that is made for you with your information and everything and that you're the only person that has access to control that and that's kind of the value prop that mental provides is like you get this the smart contract that no one else has access to we don't have access to we can't do anything with it and then you can make whatever you want

6:33and then you can sell it for whatever price you want to sell that and you get all that money so overall it's a really easy way to empower someone who doesn't have the technical understanding of saying you know deploying their own smart contract and running the tokenomics and things like that or the security behind that yeah and that's super cool especially

6:51for musicians i could see you know and a little bit in fine art as well but these digital assets where a lot of musicians put their music out and then it just gets copied and sent all over and they don't really get you know repatriated for their own work you know so as nfts continue to grow do you see this sort of tokenizing all kinds of music and fine art and everything where

7:16eventually whoever creates content will actually always be paid for the content that they're creating yeah actually in music you know a really great example something that when you when you hear this a lot of things are probably clicking your head but if i was a musician and i want to release maybe my new single so what i can do if i wanted to tokenize

7:37it is i can release maybe 100 or maybe a thousand copies of that single right and it comes with this maybe some really nice cover art right for the album cover or the single cover and when i purchase this not only do i get the song and i get to download and listen to the song but you as the artist can add all these benefits to it which is with this continuous engagements for

8:00you can say hey if you bought this single that i priced at maybe 100 or 200 which is really high for just an mp3 that's why you add these benefits you say if you bought that i will give you free access to any of my concerts for the next year right you just verify that you own that nft and now you're buying a concert ticket a collectible item and the song all in

8:21one right and so if i did that as a musician and you bought it not only could you get the song go to one of my concerts but then you can resell that to someone else to get your money back or maybe make a profit because you're trading that and with raw royalty system built into that the artist could get a percentage of that so they can say hey every every secondary cell up by nft basically

8:44ten percent five percent one percent goes back to me of the total amount that was sold so in the future i see it as a new way to kind of replace some of these older monetization methods that we have because you know musicians right now they're making pennies on the dollar for every million song downloads or listens that they're getting like spotify

9:05So if they release something like this with a big following they can make millions of dollars just in a very short amount of time so i mean it's it's blockchain so it's a little complicated in terms of like setting up a walls i can't say that everyone's going to do it but it's been growing exponentially since its release and like this year alone we've broken

9:25a lot of milestones in terms of like the total amount of volume traded and you know the amount of users that are using nfts and so i really think it's going to be a big part of adoption for crypto and the next bull run is you're gonna see a lot of people kind of understanding crypto easier or getting introduced to it because they have these digital items which makes

9:43sense to a normal person compared to like g5 or some other security protocol you know so i think it's gonna continue to grow massively definitely and that would be a super cool way for new people to get introduced to the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency as you're having to buy a song or you buy a concert ticket and all of a sudden you don't realize it but your stuff is

10:06on the blockchain right and then through that you learn about it and that's super cool and yeah you mentioned about you know the growth of your platform i know you recently launched so congratulations on that and you've been getting traction can you talk a little bit about is there incentivization or how are you growing the early adopters and evangelists of mintable as you've

10:25launched yeah so we actually when we launched principal back in 2018 right and over the years we've like iterated and had different you know we started with an alpha and a beta what we recently launched was our 2.0 version with a new marketplace and that's on the zilliqa blockchain so we have two apps right now we have the ethereum app and we have the silica app

10:47these are two different blockchains and we'll be updating the ethereum app to match the 2.0 as well so we'll have a marketplace on silica and ethereum since we launched the marketplace on silica we've seen a lot you know a lot of growth it's been very positive and i'm actually really happy with how things have turned out we you know we've we've created over

11:08like a thousand nfts on the blockchain within like the first two weeks or so and in terms of like the impact it's had on these users a lot of them using this is the first first place to be able to make nfts on silica right so a lot of the users of the silica they've never interacted with the nft and the idea that they can take their artwork sell it

11:29for you know some sort of profit is huge because it allows them to kind of gain this passive income that they haven't been able to get before because maybe they're just not a good trader or maybe they don't understand trading you know at a very high level so it like opens the doors to interacting with blockchain on a daily basis to like an everyday user

11:50And the early doctors they've really kind of been you know super supportive and they've been playing around with it because it's very new to them and they're trying to understand like what's the best way to sell how do i get better conversions right and so what we're trying to do is we're trying to you know empower them and teach them like okay this is a good

12:07way that you should list your items for so this is you know make sure that you put a watermark on the public image and high resolution on the private image and things like this yeah and so over time as the marketplace grows and there's more items we're gonna see we're gonna see quite a lot of people kind of you know adopting to using blockchain

12:28for example the wallet they used to use to interact with adapt on silica they've doubled in download since we launched right and that correlates with the amount of users that we've had and so you know it's nice to see that we're growing the blockchain ecosystem for silica as well as you know our own user base is growing and for ethereum you know we have thousands of

12:48users and so when we launch the ethereum version as well you know we'll see the same results i'm glad to hear that there's great traction since the silica launch and yeah i didn't fully understand that it was on ethereum and now it's on zilliqa and i knew you were on silica and that's a super interesting project i've been following for a few years

13:06so it's great to hear that the silica ecosystem is embracing mintable and that you've had a lot of growth and more of a higher level question for nfts you know as mintable platform continues to grow and nfts continue to grow what do you think are some of the major success success factors that will need to be into play for nfts to actually get into the mainstream

13:30to get to content creators and digital assets outside of the blockchain that's a good question you know that's that's also a hard question to answer because you can't predict the future but i would say that i think it's really important that we have like key influencers creating these digital items so you know just recently paris hilton made an nft and it sold for like 17 000

13:56right and it was just a picture of a cat that she drew which is you know quite funny for thousand dollars but it's because it's paris hilton right because she's a celebrity and there's a lot of other celebrities that are also doing this under the same project and this is on ethereum but the point is that we need to have like a celebrity who opens the doors because crypto is

14:16you know it's a it's a it's a small ecosystem so when we talk we're talking to other crypto users and we don't reach the broader audience they've never used blockchain so when you have someone who is in the outside world and they interact with these items and they start showing everyone else like hey look i just made the same amount of money i made in spotify in a year

14:37in a few days right then these musicians i see that they're like wow maybe maybe i should look into that and then as that happens you know it's just going to be a continuous growth and it's going to keep going and keep going so i think that's an important aspect and then i think of course you know just with everything in blockchain the user experience needs to be pretty

14:58solid right it needs to improve on you know not making it so complicated for these new users and that's what we try to do right we're improving the user experience for like making smart contracts and minting these items and we're trying to improve it even further to like accept credit card payments so you don't even need to have crypto but then everything would be you know

15:19denominated in crypto and so we're trying to do things like that to kind of improve the overall experience that's super cool and yeah i could definitely see some you know more a level or b level musicians tokenizing their digital music and i could see how that could start a huge push because there are some musicians that are already tokenizing but they're not

15:38really you know mainstream but i could see once the mainstream happens it could it could move quickly so that's really interesting and we're running out of time but if there are any viewers that are interested in maybe tokenizing some assets on mintable or just learning more about nfts what's the best way for them to reach out and to join the community

15:58yeah you can go to mintable at mintable.app so just like you download the app so it's the same spelling mentable.app and that's for ethereum if you want the zillow conversion you go to silica.mental.app and then it's it's fairly straightforward if you have any issues you can just join one of our communities and you know our mentors will help you out or some of the team members will

16:19be there to be able to help you out and then of course you can just shoot us an email as well overall it's a super easy process you can dive in with about two to three minutes you'll be able to have your assets tokenized and you'll be the owner of a smart contract that's gonna live forever so it's it's fairly simple very cool zack well i will leave those links

16:38in the description box below thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show all the best with mintable moving forward and let's follow up in the near future yeah thank you i appreciate acid you